This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the invention. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is prior art or what is not prior art.
An arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) is needed in many communication applications, for example, in radar systems, and is a particularly useful tool for designing and testing equipment and circuits in simulated conditions. As the speed of communication increases, the bandwidth of arbitrary waveforms required of an AWG increases. As a result, electronic AWGs are no longer effective in some high-speed applications. Radio frequency (RF)-photonic AWGs have been developed to meet the increasing bandwidth requirement, which currently can afford about 10 GHz to 20 GHz bandwidth. For example, a common RF-photonic AWG is designed with parallel optical amplitude-switching modulators.